1,882 words

Colt Keo-Meier & Diane Ehrensaft (eds.)
The Gender Affirmative Model: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Supporting Transgender and Gender Expansive Children
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2018

I’m ancient enough to remember candy cigarettes — not bad for a sugar rush, best as I can recall. What a way to advertise addiction to the kiddos, right? That fell out of favor long ago, along with the Joe Camel logo and the Flintstones advertising Winston ciggies, for obvious reasons. Still, even though confectionary cancer sticks are passé, candy-coated cultural Marxism is au courant.

Remember, folks: This is science!

Diane Ehrensaft, a feminist psychologist, teamed up with Colt Keo-Meier to write a very interesting book: The Gender Affirmative Model: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Supporting Transgender and Gender Expansive Children. It begins as rather typical gender-studies fare, as for example:

The transgender subcategory includes both binary (either girl or boy) and nonbinary gender identities. Transgender children are those who declare their gender as other than reflected by the sex marker on their birth certificate. They can show up at any age, and as early as the toddler years, as individuals are aware of their gender identity between 18 months and 3 years of age (Golombok & Fivuch, 1994). Transgender children typically consistently, persistently, and insistently express a binary or nonbinary gender and realize that their gender is different from their assigned sex. They may begin talking about their gender as soon as they begin to speak and some may express dissatisfaction with their external genitalia.

More remarkably, the book announced some new — and in some cases, presumably flavorful — genders. As I’ve shown previously, anyone can just make up new genders and sexual identities as they please. Indeed, some have been quite creative with it. On the other hand, the co-editors have plenty of street cred. From their bio page:

• Colt Keo-Meier, PhD, is a clinical psychologist whose expertise is in clinical work, research, and training in the health of transgender people of all ages. He is an assistant professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Baylor College of Medicine, lecturer and researcher in the psychology department at the University of Houston, and is completing his MD at the University of Texas Medical Branch, where he is a student scholar in the John P. McGovern Academy of Oslerian Medicine.


• Diane Ehrensaft, PhD, is a developmental and clinical psychologist, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and director of mental health of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital. She specializes in research, clinical work, training, and consultation related to gender expansive children, and she publishes and lectures nationally and internationally on this topic, as well as making media appearances. Dr. Ehrensaft is presently coinvestigator in a four-site National Institutes of Health grant studying the effects of puberty blockers and masculinizing and feminizing hormones in gender expansive and transgender youth.

All this therefore gives the silliness that is to follow a scientific imprimatur. So does the fact that the American Psychological Association published this in 2018 — and no, it’s not in their “abnormal psychology” section. I must say that they have an interesting catalog. I’d be willing to give Decolonial Psychology a whirl, except that I don’t feel like forking over 70 bucks, and it would probably be anticlimactic after slogging through Frantz Fanon.

But you’re here for the Gender Tootsie Roll Pops, right?

The book’s first chapter is available online, and it’s already a doozy. What’s captured considerable media attention recently — five years after publication — is the announcement of some creative new gender identities. (Someone actually read the thing at long last and found out what’s in it, how about that?) These seem to be the confluence of radical gender theory and the naturally boundless imaginations of the children instructed in it:

No matter what language and terminology researchers struggle to develop that will both reflect and be respectful of the multiple ways gender can present itself, children will lead the way in carving out their own self-descriptions, categorizations, and assignations of gender. So, we now build onto preexisting lists consisting of all the ways we have heard gender described by the children who have come to see us, along with some items borrowed from social media, other people’s writing, and word on the street.

There are a few new terms which seem to be approximately identical to “non-binary.” Somehow they’re distinct enough to be called other things, but my unenlightened pea brain can’t distinguish if the difference is a matter of hair-splitting or nitpicking. Other than that, several of the new gender identities are composites. This is one of the more creative ones:

Gender smoothies. Gender smoothies are a variation on the theme of gender fluid. As one teenager vividly described it, “You see, you take everything about gender, throw it in the blender, press the button, and you’ve got me — a gender smoothie.”

Then there’s “Gender Prius,” named after the Toyota hybrid automobile. The one example the book gives of a Gender Prius is someone who self-identified as “a boy in the front, a girl in the back.” That’s because he braided his hair and put it in a pink bow. (That’s admittedly not much worse than some of my own occasional fashion atrocities, but in my case, it’s just for shits and giggles.) Another automotive-inspired gender identity is the following:

Gender Teslas. The gender Tesla is the transgender state some children reach after a stint being a gender hybrid or gender ambidextrous. Some simply go from zero to 60 to get there, meaning from the sex assigned to them at birth to their affirmed gender identity. Some go more slowly. We could say that any child in the transgender category would count as a Tesla, but we are preserving this term for children who are in motion toward an all-one-gender status.

A “Gender Minotaur” is one gender on top, another down below. “Gender-by-season children” switch according to whether school is in session or not. “Gender-by-location children” switch according to where they are. That presumably means playing it straight around adults who don’t cotton to radical gender theory. Finally, the one we’ve all been waiting for:

Gender Tootsie Roll Pops. Children who exhibit one gender on the outside but experience another gender on the inside. To follow the metaphor, the crunchy outside is often the gender that accommodates to the expectations of the surrounding world, and the soft, gooey inside is the stuff of authenticity and realness. The hard candy is in place to protect or shield the inside chewiness from an unaccepting world or an internalized unaccepting part of one’s own self. It should be noted that the gender Tootsie Roll Pops, if not provided with resilience building, are often the most at-risk TGE [transgender and gender expansive] children.

I can feel the sugar rush already! While taking all this in, remember that the co-editors are highly educated. Both are clinical psychologists, and both are involved in counseling youth. Both are professors, too, which means they’re probably instructing students who will later counsel youth. Whether or not these wise professors can park their bicycles straight, I have no idea.

What was this I just read?

Whew! It’s quite odd how the gender-bending phenomenon has unfolded. In the beginning, this was about people with some chromosomal abnormalities or other physiological conditions that can lead to gender confusion. More common — yet still quite rare — were those suffering from a psychological complex. Since I’m only half as heartless as I seem, I’ll say that much is understandable up to that point. Note well, I’m not hating — I’m just demonstrating that this business has snowballed since then and went right off the deep end.

More recently, a horde of autogynephiliacs showed up to the party. They get excited imagining themselves as women. According to some speculation, perhaps their fetish was inspired by watching too much lesbian porn. Then came a batch of incels who — misguidedly, in my opinion — turn to transsexuality as a way to grab some female privilege, join the Homintern, and get laid at long last. I’m not making this up. The full list of expected social, sexual, and sociosexual perks and benefits is described in their manifesto. (One item is “Being able to extract resources from males.” You have learned your training well, young Anakin . . .) And then came the deluge.

Come to think of it, let’s imagine that comrades Magnus Hirschfeld and Arthur Kronfeld — the two who created radical gender theory back in the wild times of the Weimar Republic — had met up with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who created LSD. Even if this pair of culture-distorters had dropped more acid than John Lennon, they wouldn’t have come up with the Gender Tootsie Roll Pop thing.

Somewhere along the way, someone decided it would be a splendid idea to push this on kids. This is done in a top-down fashion through the United States Department of Education. My Spidey sense tells me the teachers’ unions may have a role in it, too. In earlier times, this wasn’t even a thing at school. (We were far less confused about all that, before they took away our dadgum candy cigarettes!) Likewise, it doesn’t occur to children to stuff beans up their noses unless someone gives them the idea.

That’s all different today. Now, Leftist teachers tell the kiddos that they don’t have to be boring boys and girls, since there’s all this other cool stuff you can identify as. It’s of no more consequence than picking a flavor of ice cream, and it makes you extra special. Honi soit qui mal y pense! The fad is increasing by leaps and bounds — just as intended. It’s going to all be fun and games until enough of these kids grow up, realize what was done to them, and summon an infantry division of lawyers.

Whatever one’s opinion of this trend is, the Gender Tootsie Roll Pop business and all the rest of it seems to be a new high water mark in surrealism. As the proverb goes, there’s nothing new under the Sun. Although I’m not entirely sure of that in this case. Juvenal’s second satire described some gender-bending and sexual peculiarity back in the days when the Roman Empire was coasting on past successes and just beginning to teeter. Still, whatever decadence they had has been exceeded in the present. The Romans did know of catamites and the eunuch-priests of Cybele. Still, there were no Gender Minotaurs, although it wouldn’t have been impossible to imagine. Gender Teslas and Priuses (Teslae and Prii in Latin?) would’ve been entirely unfathomable, since advanced automotive propulsion technologies had yet to be invented.

In that case, are today’s made-up genders and odd sexual identities really the manifestation of some eternal part of human nature, so inscrutable that none may dare question it, and so immutable that it would be an atrocity to discourage it? Heck if I know; I’m just a dumb blond from Flyover Country! Whatever the case may be, I’m glad that in my youth I was merely led into temptation by candy cigarettes. I never had to deal with a teacher backed by the school administration and supported by the academic, medical, and psychological establishments who was trying to talk me into having my penis cut off.

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